Sorry if my title is a big vague. I'm fairly new to Illustrator and and still trying to figure out how things work.
I have a few paths that I'm looking to layer, one on top of the other. From bottom to top I would have 1) a filled circle, 2) a transparent, outlined phoenix, 3) a filled city silhouette, 4) a transparent, stroked, city silhouette. But when I say transparent, I mean that it goes straight to a transparent background, not that it shows the objects below it.
Here is a picture of what I'm talking about:
So I want to make "What I want", but in Illustrator rather than Photoshop. I think two things that would allow me to do this are: 1) knowing how to combine two paths into one, and 2) knowing how to make a transparent fill that acts like a regular fill (it covers the layers below and can be used with clipping masks), just with "transparent background" as the fill value.
Or if there's another way to accomplish what I'm trying to do, I'd be happy to hear that too.